ON THE ROAD; Blessings Of a City Beside The Sea

It has been a Navy and Marine Corps base ever since 1846. Capitalizing on one of the Pacific Coast's best harbors, rivaled only by San Francisco's and Seattle's, the armed services have made the San Diego area the largest military complex in the world, home to 165,000 sailors and marines. Tom Cruise and the other jet-jocks in ''Top Gun'' flew out of Miramar Naval Air Station.

It is a tourist town, with a neo-Victorian Gaslamp District, beloved of convention-goers and families on vacation, and an equally tourist-saturated Old Town, full of adobe buildings, old and new. Its innovative, world-class zoo and the remarkable 1,800-acre Wild Animal Park, about 30 miles to the northeast, draw enormous throngs every day of the year. So does Sea World, a marine park whose painfully hokey style never seems to faze fans of Shamu, the whale.

It is a university town. The University of California at San Diego, only 38 years old, has built a global reputation in such diverse fields as bioengineering, genetics, oceanography and the neurosciences, spinning off dozens of highly profitable technology businesses in the process. U.C.S.D. has five Nobel laureates on its faculty, and six others have taught there in the past. Nobel Drive passes close to the campus. The university has been designated as one of two national supercomputer centers, linking 37 other institutions in 18 states.

It is a sports town -- swimming, surfing and tennis; hang gliding above the cliffs at La Jolla; golf at championship courses like Torrey Pines and La Costa, with gear made by companies like Callaway, Taylor Made, Cobra, Titleist and Lynx, all based just up the coast at Carlsbad, and sailing out of America's Cup Harbor, made famous by the local skipper Dennis Conner.

What makes all this possible is the benign climate, and people who live here talk constantly about its blessings. ''The weather is the main thing that shapes this place,'' said James L. Bowers, a philanthropic consultant who moved here from New York. ''In three decades as a San Diegan, I've never worn a coat, summer or winter.''

Another transplanted Easterner, Prof. Samuel Popkin of U.C.S.D., added this: ''That five minutes of sun you get every day walking to your car in winter adds up. Mothers in San Diego look as healthy as daughters in Washington.''

For a long time, people looked on San Diego as vanilla pudding, urban white bread, more Midwest than the Midwest. Former Mayor Pete Wilson, now the Governor of California, a trim, buttoned-down onetime marine who grew up in Illinois, exemplified that placid period in San Diego history. ''America's finest city,'' he christened it, with all the flair of a cost accountant.

The San Diego newspapers, owned by the Copley family, boosted the city and backed conservative politicians and values. One of their editors was Herbert G. Klein, a strategist and sometime spokesman for Richard M. Nixon.

If San Diego was bland, La Jolla, the gilded enclave north of downtown, was blander still. The mystery writer Raymond Chandler, who spent the last 13 years of his life here, once described it as ''a town of arthritic billionaires and barren old women.'' He said he longed to stand naked at high noon on the main drag, Girard Avenue, and shout four-letter words, but he never did it (and La Jolla, if truth be told, has infinitely more to offer than Chandler ever recognized).

A City Growing Up

Before World War II, San Diego had a population of only 150,000. During the war, a single factory, that of Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, employed 48,000 workers, and the bases were swollen with troops on their way to the Pacific Theater of Operations.

Those who flocked here then and after the war were mostly white, escaping dead-end jobs, cold winters and moribund older cities and towns. They joined retired naval officers, who congregated on Coronado, an almost-island connected to the mainland by a sand spit and, since 1969, by the Coronado Bridge, which vaults across the bay on colossal stilts shaped like inverted V's.

But the city is yeastier now. A funny thing happened to it on its way to a population of 1.2 million (2.7 million in San Diego County): Asian and Hispanic migrants arrived in quantity. Along with eggheads attracted by the new high-tech ventures, they have helped to give the region a more cosmopolitan atmosphere. As of last January, 23 percent of the city's population was Hispanic and 13 percent was Asian-American. The figures are increasing.

At about the same time, San Diego became something of a magnet, like Los Angeles and San Francisco before it, for wackos and weirdos. Like every place, it always had its nonconformists; Ted Williams, that most iconoclastic of baseball players, grew up here and played for Herbert Hoover High School.

But last year, the country got a glimpse of an altogether more sensational side of life in greater San Diego. First there was the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult in Rancho Santa Fe, previously known as a refined resort and residential community, and then there was the nationwide manhunt for Andrew P. Cunanan, who lived in the bohemian Hillcrest neighborhood before murdering the fashion designer Gianni Versace in Miami Beach and taking his own life.

For better and for worse, San Diego has taken its place among the nation's biggest cities. It currently ranks seventh in population. It played host to the 1996 Republican National Convention and the 1998 Super Bowl. New high-rise hotels grace the skyline, and a superb system of freeways links homes, shops, offices and especially beaches -- 70-plus miles of beautiful sand.

But this is still a young city, still somehow tentative, still in the process of becoming. There are those who profoundly regret its rapid growth, as there were when it was much smaller; John Gunther called them ''the geraniums,'' and their foes, the advocates of growth, ''the smokestacks.''

Pushing the case for a new ball park and a new library, both downtown, Neil Morgan of The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote in a recent column that there was enough talent, ambition and big money in San Diego these days to build both, and a lot more, at the same time. The moment has arrived, he said, for people here ''to decide finally who we'd really like to be when we grow up.''

Animals and Art

If anything epitomizes San Diego, it is Balboa Park, a verdant 1,200-acre enclave only a few blocks from downtown. Locals love it as much as visitors, and why not? It houses not only the zoo but also a handful of first-rate museums; one of the city's best theaters, the Old Globe, a replica of the similarly named house in Shakespeare's London, and a magnificent outdoor organ (donated by the Spreckels family, one of the city's wealthiest, which made its first millions in sugar). All that plus miles of flower beds and trails, punctuated by lovely fountains and century-old shade trees.

The park dates from 1915, when San Diego held a yearlong world fair, the Panama-California Exposition, to mark the opening of the Panama Canal. Bertram D. Goodhue, an Easterner, was chosen as the architect. Although he built the Nebraska Capitol in a vaguely Art Deco style and the chapel at West Point along neo-Gothic lines, he chose something entirely different for San Diego -- a hybrid of Spanish Renaissance and Mexican colonial styles, heavily encrusted with stonework as ornate as silverplate (and known as ''plateresque'').

For decades thereafter, what Goodhue created for a handful of monumental buildings in Balboa Park reigned as the Spanish Colonial Revival style, adapted for tens of thousands of houses and other buildings across the nation.

The zoo, which draws 3.3 million visitors a year, is San Diego's premier attraction. Almost entirely supported by private funds, it has pioneered the use of landscaped habitats, with moats replacing cages, and in 1975 began a program to reproduce endangered species like the giant panda. Unlike many, this zoo, which houses more than 800 kinds of animals, pays as much attention to flora as fauna, maintaining a collection of 6,500 botanical species.

Our favorite sight on a recent visit: the Polar Bear Plunge, with one of the gigantic carnivores frolicking on and beneath a white plastic ''ice floe'' in the 14-foot-deep moat.

Among the dozen or so museums are buildings devoted to space, railroads, sports, photography and folk art (the latter temporarily graced by seven of Niki de Saint Phalle's oversized Seussian creatures, whose mirrored and enameled surfaces glisten appealingly in the sun). Two museums concentrate primarily on paintings and sculpture. The San Diego Museum of Art has a collection strong in Spanish, Italian and American works (notice the three exquisite little depictions of peaches by Raphaelle Peale and one of Morgan Russell's rare Synchronist studies). John Singleton Copley's great masterpiece, ''Mrs. Thomas Gage,'' a portrait of an aristocratic Englishwoman with liquid brown eyes, hangs at the smaller Timken Museum of Art nearby.

Serious music has had a hard time here. The opera company, though not of national stature, operates in the black and attracts good audiences. But dance is a bit of a stranger, and the San Diego Symphony, which went bust a while ago, has just been re-formed with a new board and conductor, Jung-Ho Pak, who also leads orchestras (not the main ones) in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The highlight of the performing arts scene may be chamber music, particularly the La Jolla Summerfest, which takes place each August. It is put on by the same organization that presents big-league concerts in La Jolla and San Diego each year, featuring the likes of Joshua Bell and Mariss Jansons. David Finckel, the cellist of the Emerson Quartet, and his wife, the pianist Wu Han, have just been named as the joint directors of the appealingly intimate festival.

Along the Coast

But it is the sea, not high culture, that brings people to San Diego, and there is no better way to savor the city than to wander south along the coast from Del Mar (where Bing Crosby used to own a piece of the race track) to Point Loma, the most southwesterly point in the continental United States.

You could start at Torrey Pines State Reserve, an unspoiled seaside tract of rugged ravines and sandstone cliffs, which glow red in the setting sun and lurk menacingly in the frequent fogs. Most of the world's remaining Torrey pines, fewer than 5,000 of them, are concentrated here -- beautiful, often wind-contorted trees whose needles are borne in clusters of five.

Ellen Browning Scripps, the philanthropic sister of the publisher E. W. Scripps, bought and saved the trees for posterity. Her dollars also shaped La Jolla, endowing the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose new Birch Aquarium opened in 1992, the Scripps Clinic and the Scripps Memorial Hospital.

Miss Scripps was the principal patron of the trailblazing architect Irving J. Gill. His pared-down buildings, on which cornices and window moldings and pediments are all discarded in favor of unembellished surfaces and simple yet memorably elegant arches, dominate a whole section of La Jolla.

Three buildings -- the Bishop's School, the pristine La Jolla Women's Club (1912-14) and Miss Scripps's own house, masterfully converted by Robert Venturi for the Museum of Contemporary Art -- all lie within easy walking distance of one another. Downtown, the early Marston House, near Balboa Park, and the handsome First Church of Christ Scientist, at the corner of Second Avenue and Laurel Street, where restoration is almost complete, can be visited.

Gill's work is astonishingly similar to that of Adolph Loos in Vienna at the same period, although the two appear to have known little if anything of each other. His buildings are not widely known today; yet Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the architectural historian, says that ''his best houses extend very notably the range of achievement of the first generation of modern architects.''

The museum that Mr. Venturi made from Miss Scripps's house is a tour de force of adaptive restoration, and its collection includes a fine assembly of present-day art, including works by Californians like Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman.

La Jolla offers other seaside delights as well, including the La Jolla Playhouse, founded by Gregory Peck and some of his Hollywood pals. One of San Diego's main stages, along with the Old Globe and the San Diego Repertory Theater downtown, it produces a fair number of plays that end up on or off Broadway.

Then there is the campus of the Salk Institute, the research center founded by Dr. Jonas Salk, the conqueror of polio. Designed by Louis I. Kahn, it is composed of two mirror-image six-story buildings, built of teak, glass and unfinished concrete, facing each other across a travertine plaza that is bisected by a narrow waterway. The undulating facades of the buildings set up a powerful rhythm, seeming to recede into infinity, like some renaissance study of perspective, and the waterway seems to empty into the Pacific beyond.

To pass instantly from high culture to pop culture, all you need do is head a few miles south, to the point where Garnet Avenue reaches the sea. There stand two local institutions, the Crystal Pier Hotel, a motel built on a pier over the ocean, and Kono's Cafe, with a perpetual queue of customers lined up outside. On the boardwalk that runs along the sand (a concrete walk, actually, but why quibble?) there passes in review, each and every morning, a Pacific Beach world that cries out for a 20th-century Brueghel to immortalize it.

There are joggers and skateboarders, bicyclists and riders of a vehicle known as a California Chariot, a kind of stand-up tricycle; there are bums smoking nasty little butts and mothers pushing or pulling three-wheeled prams and hundreds of Rollerblade skaters, some gliding along as if they had been born on the things, others wobbling as if they had been born to fall down.

In just a few moments one fine August morning, my wife, Betsey, and I saw an aging hippie with a ponytail and a Colonel Sanders beard, and numberless ancient women who had clearly spent a lifetime ignoring American Cancer Society warnings about too much sun, and a blond guy in a straw hat, who looked like a model for the J. Crew catalogue, working on a marine watercolor, and, inevitably I guess, a burly man with a green macaw perched on his shoulder.

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You need a real California drink here: buy yourself a smoothie. If you don't know the genuine, quite irresistible article, stop first on Fay Avenue in La Jolla at a place named the Juice Kaboose (I kid you not), where young Sean Tutt will explain the basic principles for you, as he did for me. Then he'll run a mixture of orange juice (squeezed before your eyes), fresh mango slices, ice and nonfat frozen yogurt through the blender. If ever the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts, this is the moment.

Finally to Point Loma, where both San Diego and modern California got their starts. On Sept. 28, 1542, the explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed past this rocky promontory and into the bay. Standing today near the old lighthouse, looking down at jets taking off from the airport, skyscrapers clustered downtown and tens of thousands of sailboat masts rising from marinas, I found it hard to imagine the virginal landscape that greeted him.

To get any real sense of the isolation of the Spaniards, you have to head back inland, eight miles up the San Diego River. There in 1774 Father Junipero Serra built the Mission of San Diego de Alcala, the first of a chain of 21 missions along the coast. This is a neighborhood of freeways and subdivisions now, with the baseball and football stadium close by.

But as you visit the little cell where Father Serra lived, and stand in the garden beneath the lovely white facade of the mission's bell tower, you may be able to conjure up a picture, if only barely, of how limitless this new continent must have looked to him and how distant Madrid must have seemed.

Here is information about visiting the San Diego area:

Where to Stay

HOTEL DEL CORONADO, 1500 Orange Avenue, (619) 435-6611. Few hotels offer as much history with a night's rest as this turreted landmark, built in 1888 of white clapboard and red shingles. Wallis Simpson and the Prince of Wales are said to have met at the Del; Marilyn Monroe & Company cavorted there in ''Some Like It Hot.'' It boasts 692 rooms (316 air-conditioned), a beach and two pools. Rooms range from $190 to $550 a night.

HYATT REGENCY LA JOLLA, 3777 La Jolla Village Drive, (619) 552-1234. Designed by the post-modernist Michael Graves, part of a mesa-top complex that also includes Cafe Japengo (see below), this is one of the better Hyatts, with cherrywood furniture in the rooms, a sleek lobby and a good pool. Convenient location just off a main freeway; beware noisy Thursday night booze-ups. Rooms start at $214 for a one-night stay and $159 a night for longer stays.

LOEWS CORONADO BAY, 4000 Coronado Bay Road, (619) 424-4000. Cross the Coronado Bridge, turn left down the spit of land known as the Silver Strand and there, in a 15-acre enclave, lies this modern resort, with swimming, water skiing, an 80-slip marina, 440 rooms and a good restaurant. Many rooms look across the bay toward the city, and the ocean is just a short walk. Rooms start at $235 a night on weekends; $165 to $215 weekdays.

LA VALENCIA, 1132 Prospect Street, La Jolla, (619) 454-0771. A taste of yesteryear, a cluster of pink buildings on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. A friend of mine remembers seeing Gregory Peck and his wife climbing out of a convertible and sweeping into the lobby, which seems perfect for this classic establishment, built in 1926. Some rooms are small, so specify a larger one. Rooms range from $205 to $450.

WESTGATE HOTEL, 1055 Second Avenue, (619) 238-1818. This is San Diego's premier downtown hotel, a courtly, traditional establishment with crystal chandeliers and Oriental rugs, housed in a 1970's tower. Spectacular views over the bay from the upper floors; guest rooms distinguished by absolute quiet and ample proportions. The service is swift and friendly. A winner. Rooms range from $174 to $224.

CIEN ANOS, Jose Maria Velazco 1407, Tijuana, (011) 5266-343-039. No Tex-, no Cal-, just Mex. No mariachis, either -- just sophisticated, authentic Mexican cooking, in an immaculate, side-street casita just south of the border: octopus stewed with chilies and herbs, crepes stuffed with the hauntingly flavored corn fungus called huitlacoche and shrimp in tangy tamarind sauce.

LAUREL, 505 Laurel Street, (619) 239-2222. This is the sibling of the Wine Sellar and Brasserie, a top-rated spot with a stunning wine list (13 pinot noirs from Williams Selyem). It's less formal, and the wine list is a bit shorter, but it's more central, and the gifted Douglas Organ oversees the food here, too. Typical dishes: semolina and white corn gnocchi with wild mushroom ragout, veal cheeks and turnips in red wine, Moroccan-spiced chicken breast.

POINT LOMA SEAFOODS, 2805 Emerson Street, (619) 223-1109. San Diego is not a great town for formal dining, but its casual spots are dandy -- like this lively waterfront market whose showcases hold a vast variety of fresh and smoked fish. They make the definitive tuna sandwich from sourdough bread and freshly caught albacore they bake themselves. Also fine shellfish salads.

RUBIO'S BAJA GRILL, 901 Fourth Avenue, (619) 231-7731 (and other locations). Ralph Rubio, a local lad, brought the recipe for fish tacos back from a surfing vacation in Baja California and made a fortune selling them to hungry San Diegans. Pollock, lightly fried in beer batter, shredded cabbage, yogurt sauce and salsa, wrapped in a tortilla: try one, and you'll be hooked.

WILD ANIMAL PARK, 15500 San Pasqual Valley Road, Escondido, (760) 747-8702. An 1,800-acre wildlife preserve about 30 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. Open 365 days a year, 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $19.95; $12.95 for ages 3 to 11; free for children 2 and under. Parking is an additional $3.

SEA WORLD ADVENTURE PARK, Sea World Drive, one mile west of Interstate 5, San Diego, (619) 226-3901. Open Mondays through Fridays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. Admission: $35.95; $26.95 for ages 3 to 11; free for children 2 and under. Parking is an additional $6.

SAN DIEGO ZOO, Balboa Park, (619) 234-3153. Open daily, year round, 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. Admission: $16; $7 for children 3 to 11; free for children 2 and under.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART, Balboa Park, (619) 232-7931. On view through Nov. 1: ''Old Masters Brought to Light: European Paintings From the National Museum of Art of Romania.'' Opening Oct. 3: ''M. C. Escher: A Centennial Tribute.'' Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Admission: $7; $5 for the elderly and young adults, 18 to 24; $2 for children 6 to 17; free for children under 6. Fridays through Sundays, all admission increased by $1.

MARSTON HOUSE, 3525 Seventh Avenue, near northwest corner of Balboa Park, (619) 298-3142. Historic mansion built in 1905 and designed by William Hebbard and Irving Gill. Open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Admission: $5; free for children under 13.

OLD GLOBE THEATER, at the Simon Edison Center for the Performing Arts in Balboa Park, (619) 239-2255. Shakespeare's ''Romeo and Juliet,'' daily except Mondays at 8 P.M., in the outdoor Festival Theater through Oct.11. ''The Old Settler,'' by John Henry Redwood, indoors at the Cassius Carter Center Stage, Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 P.M.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 P.M and Sundays at 2 P.M., through Oct. 24. Tickets: $29 to $39.

PACIFIC BEACH PARK, Beach Boulevard, between Diamond and Thomas Streets. About three miles long with a surfing and sail-board area, a fishing pier and an amusement park. Free admission.

MISSION SAN DIEGO DE ALCALA, 10818 San Diego Mission Road, at Friars Road, (619) 281-8449. The grounds of this working Roman Catholic mission are open daily from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $2.

La Jolla Attractions

LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE, at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts, on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, (619) 550-1010. ''Light Up the Sky,'' by Moss Hart, Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 P.M., Saturdays at 2 and 8 P.M. and Sundays 2 and 7 P.M., through Sept. 27. ''Dogeaters,'' by Jessica Hagedorn, begins previews Sept. 8 and runs at the same performance times, through Oct. 11.

BIRCH AQUARIUM, at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, North Torrey Pines Road and Expedition Way, La Jolla, (619) 534-3474. Open daily, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. Admission: $7.50; $6.50 for the elderly; $5 for students; $4 for children 3 to 17 and free for children under 3.

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, 700 Prospect Street, (619) 234-1001. Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Sundays, noon to 5 P.M. Admission: $3; $1 for students and the elderly; free for children under 13. (There are also galleries at 1001 Kettner Boulevard in San Diego.)

LA JOLLA WOMEN'S CLUB, 715 Silverado Street, at Prospect Street, (619) 454-2354. The club and gardens may be viewed on Saturdays from 9 A.M. to noon.

TORREY PINES STATE RESERVE, just north of Torrey Pines City Park, on Coast Highway 101, (619) 755-2063. A 2,000-acre reserve with beaches, a lagoon and walking trails. Open daily, 8 A.M to sunset. Parking fee: $4; $3 for the elderly.

Getting There

BY PLANE: Continental has nonstop flights from La Guardia Airport to San Diego. Round-trip fare with a 14-day advance reservation is $480; with no advance reservation, $1,840. Reservations: (800) 525-0280.